In full view

I got to uni early (as per normal on Tuesdays) and I wound up on my own in a computer lab, stuffed around by going through bloglines and reading what others had to say and saving some pages for my uni blog. Then I opened Bible Gateway – because I couldn’t be bothered working on my assignment for just 15 or so minutes and I read through Romans 3-8. I have a slight obsession with Romans 8 sometimes but was pretty happy to get a bit of a different perspective on some things by looking at the Message version.

Romans 3:25-26
God sacrificed Jesus on the altar of the world to clear that world of sin. Having faith in him sets us in the clear. God decided on this course of action in full view of the public—to set the world in the clear with himself through the sacrifice of Jesus, finally taking care of the sins he had so patiently endured. This is not only clear, but it’s now—this is current history! God sets things right. He also makes it possible for us to live in his rightness.

I wasn’t thinking about it earlier but if I can steal a phrase (just because it jogged some more thoughts) but: “In full view of the public.”
We sure don’t opperate that way as Christians most of the time.

I had a very funny – it thrilled me to pieces actually, experience this afternoon as I was coming home. I was in Box Hill waiting for my train and this really short asian girl taps me on the sleeve. She was with two other girls. They ask if I’m a student and let me know they are Bible College Students from South Korea learning English in Australia and ‘teaching Bible’. I smiled and said I was a Christian which made Ruth (it was something like that anyway, she’s the extremely short one) quite excited and she was bouncing around and beaming and saying bless you… Sophia, was the most competent with English and I ended up sitting down with the three of them in the food court. So after Ruth had gotten a photo, Sophia pulled out her Bible which was an English/Korean parallel. And I think they were ‘having a practice’. We discussed the passover and communion and what Jesus had done and were reading bits and pieces together. I was beaming, it was gold! They were so happy and really just lovely. Communication was a bit hard. Ruth kept starting to explain things in English and getting carried away and slipping into Korean. It was beautiful!

I got the ‘evangelistic’ aspect of what they were doing despite not really needing it (they knew that) and just the excitement for me of seeing how God is working in them and through them and how willing they were to just be out there talking to people. The idea of ever doing something that freely freaks the living daylights out of me. They asked for my phone number, so I gave them my mobile (haha which will hopefully be okay) and had to head to get my train.

On the train, I ended up having a conversation with an older guy on a scooter and his wife. He was pretty intent on telling me about some big accident he’d been in and how his body was ‘riddled with’ cancer and how radio-therapy had cured his prostrate cancer but it had come back… he mentioned that he was in AA and wasn’t ashamed to admit it, and how life now was the best it had ever been (despite the cancer).

I was thinking about it later, why God would dump me in the two rather peculiar situations and I guess the common thread through the two is the fact that these people were so genuine and so open about who they were to me. This guy wasn’t ashamed to say he’d screwed up a lot of his life and was really just loving where he was now. Those girls were happy to speak up about what was important to a complete stranger.

If like that guy, ‘life is the best it has ever been’, when we have this free life in Jesus, why is it so hard to be open about being a Christian and to share about who we know God to be?